Femi Akomolafe is a computer consultant, writer and a social commentator/critic. Femi and his crew currently produce videos, films and documentaries. Femi lives in Kasoa, Ghana.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Where are our scientists?

A friend once asked me why my radio set is permanently tuned to BBC World Service. My answer was a simple: ‘Because I don’t have a mind that consumes inanities.’

The mind, they say, is a terrible thing to waste. I have a very healthy respect for my mind and I simply do not allow any rubbish to pollute it. My mind is my altar and I try as much as possible to keep it sanctified and unpolluted.

The gods know that I have tried to tune in to our numerous FM stations, but gosh, they are simply a waste of [my] time. My time is too valuable to me to be wasted on nonsensical.

Try tune in to any of our numerous FM station in wee hours of the morning and all you get are parasitic priests making one fraudulent claim or the other. These religious parasites are all out there trying to outdo themselves in their fraudulent claims; the end of which is to separate ignorant people from their pennies (or pesewas in our case).

No miracle is too wondrous for these charlatans to claim to be able to perform. There is no illness under our wide sky they cannot claim to be able to cure. They will promise to help you get a visa to any country of your choice.

I have nothing against religion, per se, even if I wholeheartedly agree with Karl Marx that it is the opiate of the people. What I hate is hypocrisy, especially religious hypocrisy.

The duplicitous priest standing there telling ungodly lies knows that he’s playing the hypocrite. He knows also that we know that he is a darned fraud. But the parasitic priest understands our psychology only too well. He knows that we are all a bunch of hypocrites who are afraid to speak our minds. He also knows that most of us have minds that are too enfeebled to digest even the simplest of abstractions.

The fraudulent priest knows that we want all the good things of life but are unwilling to work for it. He knows that we like freebies the way children like toffees. He knows that the majority of us are as ignorant as cast-iron statues. He knows that many of us go through life without reading anything more serious than Lotto papers. That explains why he can afford to throw any ignorant dart into our faces and expect us to shout hallelujah.

The scrounging priest knows that many of us posses minds that have little room for informed ideas. He knows that most of us feed on gossip, innuendoes and blatant lies the way leeches fed on blood.

The lying priest knows this and he knows that we know that he knows that he’s fooling us. Yet, audaciously he continues. Why? The answer is simple: Most of us lack the courage of our conviction. For any number of reasons we prefer to be lied to instead of being told some bitter home truth.

That explains why any parasitical priest can wake up in the morning, bestow on himself any title he likes and go on our streets to tell any lies that he likes, in the name of a Jewish tribal god and his purported son. That’s the only reason why the priests can arm themselves with a book packed full of lies, contradictions, pornography, wars and pestilences and call it a Holy Bible. They know that our minds are too enfeebled to raise a protest. Our only response would be to call the thieving charlatans ‘Men of god.’ Men of God, indeed!

Hardly a day passes that there are no reports of these so-called ‘men of god,’ committing one unpardonable crime or the other: rape has become commonplace in our so-called ‘houses of god.’ Swindling has become a pastime of our cassocked priests. Yet, they continue to have the effrontery to show their faces on out TVs, cry themselves hoarse on our airwaves promising us some spiritual deliverance.

The ignoble priest, very aware of our infinite hypocrisy, will continue to do this because he knows that in our hearts of hearts we are all very much like him. He knows that religion for most of us has become mere adornment to bedazzle our neighbours. He knows that we pay only lip-service to the preached Christian love and brotherhood. How many of us genuinely care about our neighbour? How many of us are truly our brother’s keeper?

The parasitic priests are not the only people taking us for sweet rides; the politicians (politricians) are also doing it. They tell us silly lies because they know full well that, like little children, we crave only immediate gratification. Like the grasshopper we give scanty regard for the morrow.

The so-called analysts who are supposed to give us informed opinions are also doing it. How otherwise do we explain the situation whereby a very senior journalist will go on air to condemn a book that he hasn’t read! Do we really need to open our mouth when we have nothing sensible to say?

The simple words: ‘I don’t know,’ do not seem to exist in the vocabulary of our so-called learned men. They become walking encyclopedias hopping from one media house to the other dispensing their ignorance like no man’s business. They know that we do not know better since we are too lazy to be comfortable in the company of books. These ignoramuses become our fountain of knowledge. They are ever ready to discuss varied subjects from astronomy to zoology. Throw complex calculus at them and they will give a go without batting an eyelid.

Listening to the so-called debates on our radio is simply a terrible waste of time. Does even hypocrisy begin to describe the situation whereby people with big titles go on live programmes to tell bare-faced lies? What manner of people are we really when we think nothing of exposing our crass ignorance just to get on the air? And what about those among us who phone in to contribute to programmes in which they have absolutely no idea. I have listened to radio programmes where expectant contributors started asking what the subject matter was! Little wonder then that the mobile phone companies are laughing to their banks at our expense!

I have also listened [in awe] as panelists display the crassest ignorance on the subject they were invited to discuss. Do you still wonder why many panelists often resort to fist-cuffs? When refined arguments cannot be posited, the ignorant often resort to brute force which, to him, is the only way out. Brute muscle becomes substitute for logical, coherent reasoning.

Another of our ignoble tendencies is our penchant for totally useless debates. Upon all the problems confronting our country and our continent, where on earth do our people find the time to debate whether Man U is a better club than Chelsea and so forth and so forth, ad nauseam?

On a journey back from Kumasi recently, a co-passenger, a fully-grown Ghanaian, was shedding copious tears because his favourite English team lost a match!

It is time we start to ask ourselves whether or not we are serious as a people. Whilst people elsewhere are busy prying into nature’s darkest secrets and revealing scientific breakthrough to improve their material well-being, we still mired ourselves in self-induced ignorance.

In this age that elementary school children in other lands are surfing the internet with ease, we still listen, with rapt attention, to parasitic priests telling us that it is witches that are responsible for lack of rain. Or that misfortunes are caused by mother-in-laws!

Almost half a century after the Americans took a man to the moon and brought him back safely, ignoble and ignorant charlatans, robed in priestly garbs, still have the guts to tell us that car accidents are caused by evil spirits and that they can be kept at bay by the chanting of some useless Psalms!

Is it not time we start to think and plan properly instead of waiting for the goblins of the sky to come and solve our earthly problems? Instead of giving our airwaves to useless, parasitic priests, why don’t we invest [some] of our time is scientific enquiry? Instead of giving platforms to these shameless impostors, why don’t we start giving our scientists some time to discuss and explains things to us? IInstead of listening to religious parasites telling us stupid lies, we should afford trained minds to explain to us why we are dying needlessly from easily curable [preventable] disease like cholera, malaria and fever. Instead of chanting ourselves hoarse at prayer camps, we should use some of our time and muscles to clean up our environment.

Instead of charlatan priests deafening our eardrums with stupid lies, we should afford our Agriculturalists the opportunity to tell us how we can earn good money by processing the by-products of our cocoa, our palm kernels, our coconuts etc. Our Army Corps of Engineers should be allowed to help build dams, bridges etc. Our technologists should be given the space to display their potentials.

We ritually bemoan our lack of development and progress and yet we waste all our days and nights in useless supplication to gods. We should give ourselves a little test: let’s invest one percent of the time we spend praying to the gods in thinking about solving a specific problem. We can take any of the myriads of problems confronting us: poor sanitation, inadequate food supply, environmental degradation, and think collectively on how to solve them. Let’s tackle our poor sanitation problem with no prayer at all but with pure hard work and let’s see the result in say three months.One of our leaders once said that he would like to turn the whole country into a prayer camp. I don’t know if he expected us to say Amen. But we should have asked him what single benefit we have derived from all the prayers and all the supplications to Jesus and his father in heaven [wherever that is]!

Instead of our leaders asking for the interventions of the goblins of the sky, they should bring out policies to put us to work. We spend about $600 million of our earned-money importing rice from Asia and America. We danced senseless in stupid advertisements to celebrate our eating American rice: do we really have any sense of decency or shame? If the Americans and the Asians are wasting their own time in prayer camps like we do, will they be able to be growing the rice that has now become our staple?

The shameless bloodsucking priests promising us alujanah are enjoying their own paradise right here on earth. They dine and wine at the finest restaurants (no roadside kiosk for them). They attired themselves in the best of fine dresses and they tool around in the best 4-Wheel that money can buy. The con-artists are preying on the brainless apushkeleke in their churches. They then go to their churches and tell their ignorant congregation some stupid lies – then it’s donation, donation, donation for the glory of God, Amen!

I recently went to one of those so-called Charismatic churches and it took great effort not to want to slap the priest. How on earth can a man lie so shamelessly? And to see how the swindler was being mobbed and adored by his mindless flock, good gracious, me!

I had wanted to ask the trickster how any human being with an iota of decency can hold the Christian Bible, read it and proclaim it the words of god. Some God!Yet, these scourging priests feel no compunction at all in lying through their teeth to tell some goddamned lies about a father in heaven who is taking care of affairs in our behalf. Do you still wonder why we keep on living in miserable existence unfit for pets in some countries?

Let’s talk more about our vast hypocrisy. We enjoy all the gadgets other people are whipping up – we want to pack the latest Laptops, mobile phones, Plasma TVs, HiFis, Watches etc, etc. But we never pause to ask ourselves how these products came into being. Do we really think that the implacable tyrant of a god in our ‘Holy Bible’ is sending these goodies from heaven?

Hell, no! They are products of science, technology and engineering. They, without exception, were conceived by human minds. They were built by mere mortal like you and I. These scientists, technologists and engineers have one head like you and I; they have the same brain cells that you and I possess but unlike people in our parts of the world, they believe in utilizing their brain power to solve any problem that confront them.

For our intellectual laziness, we have everyone but ourselves to blame. We blame the government, we blame the politicians but we never pause to ask how many of us exhibit any iota of creative or entrepreneurial prowess.

Whilst we spend inordinate hours gyrating senseless to some father in heaven, other people are busy utilizing the brain power to produce marvels that continually wow us. We produce nothing but we are world champions when it comes to gluttonous consumption.

We spend our waking hours praying; our night is consumed with another unproductive venture: parties. We have absolutely no conception of time. We waste time like no man’s business.

I felt great anger about two Saturday’s ago when I have to cover an event in the Akuapem area. The organizers have spent good money in printing a glossy pamphlet which said boldly that the ceremony was to start at 12 noon and end at 15:20. Ok, Ok, I know that we are not champions when it comes to time keeping so I made allowance for lateness. But I could hardly contain myself when the Special Guest of Honour who was slated to give his address at 14:15 didn’t zoom in until after five pm!

Of course, protocol (?) demands that he should be respected. But if the second in command in our country think nothing of three hours of his time, then we are in serious trouble.

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Kaabo \ Welcome

I welcome you to my blog.

As you shall soon find out, I hold very strong opinions and I am never afraid to express them in the strongest terms possible.

As you shall also soon realise, I'm a passionate Pan-Africanist. It goes without saying that I am unconditionally opposed to racism in all its manifestations. I abhor the doctrine that skin colour confers some form of superiority.

While I am prepared to be a brother to one and all, I reject anyone playing BIG brother to me.

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I shall endeavour not to write anything herein except that which is true, factual and verifiable. If you find errors, I will appreciate your bringing it to my attention. I shall try and take note and correct them.

If your intention is to bandy insults around, I advise that you set up your own blog.

As my Yoruba people say: "Oju orun teye fo, lai fara gbara."

It means that the sky is big enough for all the birds to fly without touching wings.